People need sleep. Many people can't sleep. Mattress manufacturers and sales entities purport to remedy these matters through various items of mattress technology.
Beds are used in private or institutional settings. Current mattresses are unwieldy, unhygienic, expensive and of insufficient durability. Air mattresses were designed to remedy some of these shortcomings. However, air mattresses themselves suffer from multiple deficiencies, including unwieldiness, cost (for the higher end products), fragility and lack of comfort.
Lack of comfort is central to the failure of air mattresses to take over the market. Air mattresses are far more flexible in their use than ordinary mattresses. They can be deflated and stored with minimal space requirements. They are light and easy to transport. They are silent. They are also more hygienic (though still suffering from deficiencies in this area, such as the lack of air movement and thus the build-up of transpiration and other human excretions at the surface of the air bladder).
But standard air mattresses are still woefully inadequate because they are essentially no more than a dressed up air bladder. Some improvement have been proposed in prior art, but little of this promising technology has been translated into the market.
Air beds bottom out, they do not provide the same support as current mattresses, they are subject to imbalance and uncomfortable deformation when the load is presented and they cannot achieve the same height profile expected of a standard bed.
The proposed technology will remedy all air bed (and other air mattress support applications) shortcomings. In various embodiments it will permit the perfect emulation of the characteristics of most currently marketed bed. It will be able to transmit air to the surface, useful for hospital applications. And its ease of manufacture means that its cost should not be significantly higher than that of current air beds.
For institutional use, the issue of paramount importance is skin integrity and prevention of decubitus ulcers. For a detailed discussion refer to Zdravko (EP1037582). A brief excerpt is EXTENSIVELY PARAPHRASED here:
“Maximum permissible pressure to prevent hindering the circulation of blood—and therefore to prevent decubiti—is equal to the mean pressure in the arterial capillaries. This is estimated as approximately 4 kPa (30 mm Hg=40.8 g/cm2). Some other authors (K. D. Neander) recommend the upper limit to be reduced below the mean pressure in venal capillaries, 1.6 kPa (12 mm Hg=16.5 g/cm2) in any region that constitutes primary support to the body. further, measurements made by Khan, K. Lee and their associates indicate that the pressure at the supporting region is increased by 3 till 5 times if any of the prominent bones occurs within the region. The importance of this issue is well known in medicine; the parts of the body lacking fat tissues under the skin are critical in forming the decubitus (FIG. 2.7). External pressure, according to fluid mechanics. should therefore be reduced to 3 to 5 times less than 1.6 kPa to allow an undisturbed blood circulation in this critical regions.
In contrast to this pressure maximum, pressures when laying on a hard surface can, at the critical points, reach a magnitude of 40 kPa (300 mm Hg=408 g/cm2). Sitting is even more dramatic, 666 kPa (5000 mm Hg=6.8 kg/cm2) (E. R. Tichauer) (FIGS. 2.3 and 2.4). Well designed mattresses will dramatically reduce these high pressures, to below the pressure in the venous capillaries. However, the pressure under 1.6 kPa can be obtained only if the body is distributed horizontally and without significantly elevated sections.”